ŽAneta's Life: Whose Fault? “Patient” Unemployed and the Others in the Czech Welfare System

In the paper I would like to portray the life of one Roma woman Žaneta, who lives in Czech town Chomutov and whose life I could follow during fieldwork in 2012 and 2013. On her life experience I would like to illustrate how changes in Czech welfare politics produced new discourses about the poor (“patient poor” are “deserving”), new way of social work (from social work to discipline work) and also how through categorization of the unemployed welfare professionals exercise power and reproduce inequality among the poor. Žaneta was one of the unemployed who were “suspicious character” for her social worker also because she was sensitive to any kind of devaluation of her self-esteem and responded back in order to protect her identity. Later on she was found as “undeserving”, “cheating” the system and thus “abusing state money”. This categorization created new situation to her. It sentenced Žaneta to live without welfare money, limited her possibilities to responses and also refused her Czech citizenship. In sentenced her to live without support by the welfare office, later on without support by local NGO, and later on without support by the Czech and Slovak legal systems. Showing her different responses in different periods of her life I show, how her difficult life was more and more understood by different institutions as outcomes of her own faults, not being “patient” specifically.